Will Oldham Tribute - addtl MMJ Track

[LaurieBlue]

(Old news?  I don't recall seeing this)...

http://www.tractrecords.com/oldhamtribute.htm

I AM A COLD ROCK. I AM DULL GRASS.
A TRIBUTE TO THE MUSIC OF WILL OLDHAM  (TR016)
  
Sammy Harkham who's done some artwork for Will's  
releases in the past did the cover.  
Chris Kenny  provided additional artwork.
  
The double disc version  is completely out of print.
  
REISSUE NEWS:
The single disc reissue should make an appearance this summer with most of disc one remaining intact and additional tracks provided by:
  
Mark Kozelek "New Partner"    {MP3}
Viking Moses "When Thy Song Flows Through Me"
Unbunny "For The Mekons, et al"
Court And Spark "The Sun Highlights The Lack In Each"
Jolie Holland "Drunk At The Pulpit"
My Morning Jacket
  
more details to follow
  
DISC ONE:
01. Moyra Mc Bride and Maxon Blewitt "Disorder"      {MP3}
02. The Strugglers "Riding"                     {MP3}
03. Calexico "I Send My Love To You"           {MP3}
04. Boy Omega "A Sucker's Evening"         {MP3}
05. Pink Nasty "May It Always Be"     {MP3}
06. Pinetop Seven "A Minor Place"                     {MP3}
07. Adrian Crowley "West Palm Beach"
08. Sodastream "Southside Of The World"
09. Pale Horse And Rider "Work Hard Play Hard"
10. Iron And Wine  "We All, Us Three, Will Ride"   {MP3}
11. The Impossible Shapes  "Rider"
12. Rivulets "You Will Miss Me When I Burn"    {MP3}
13. Sorry About Dresden  "All Gone, All Gone"
14. Racingpaperplanes   "Careless Love"          {MP3}
15. Scout Niblett   "Trudy Dies"                   {MP3}
  
(this part is totally out of print but presented here for your knowledge)
DISC TWO: (included in the first 500 copies)
01. Jeffrey Luck Lucas "Agnes, Queen Of Sorrow"
02. Saint Aldrijn "Werner's Last Blues To Blokbuster"
03. Christian Kiefer "Viva Ultra"
04. Patrik Torsson "The Gator"
05. Joel Martin "Wolf Among Wolves"
06. Thistleblossom "Allowance"
07. Tiger Saw "Hard Life"
08. Diana Darby "Valentines Day"
09. Last Harbour "Old Jerusalem"
10. The Prayers And Tears Of Arthur Digby Sellers  "Raining In Darling"
11. The Channel  "Black"
12. Celestine "O, Let It Be"
13. Above The Orange Trees "Tonight's Decision (And Hereafter)"
14. Molasses "We All, Us Three, Will Ride"
15. Hudson Bell "Kid Of Harith"

[fitzcarraldo]

Mark Kozelek and the Jacket on the same disc. Awesome!!! I always thought Mark should tour with Jim and M.Ward because he is a true 'Monster of Folk'!!!  :)

[aMillionDreams]

I don't know how much I trust this.  Why doesn't MMJ have a song by their name?   I don't understand what disc their supose to be on.  Besides, I think I remember reading in an interview with Jim James that he hates the music on Will Oldham.  Does anybody remember that article?

[ratsprayer]

I don't know how much I trust this.  Why doesn't MMJ have a song by their name?   I don't understand what disc their supose to be on.  Besides, I think I remember reading in an interview with Jim James that he hates the music on Will Oldham.  Does anybody remember that article?

i remember the article, but i dont know if he said he hated his music versus talking about moving the band out of the louisville-type stereotypes of will oldham and slint, or something.  im sure this clears things up nicely.   ;D ;D

[EC]

I don't know how much I trust this.  Why doesn't MMJ have a song by their name?   I don't understand what disc their supose to be on.  Besides, I think I remember reading in an interview with Jim James that he hates the music on Will Oldham.  Does anybody remember that article?

I remember something about that.  I thought it had to do with the integrity of music making...  But, yeah, I can't hardly remember, either.

[ratsprayer]

I remember something about that.  I thought it had to do with the integrity of music making...  But, yeah, I can't hardly remember, either.

im blaming my lack of memory on my two kids and / or me being a burnout.   ;)

[EC]

im blaming my lack of memory on my two kids and / or me being a burnout.   ;)

Shit.  I have no available options for why I can't remember.

Except that I'm having a lot of problems remembering things lately.  But I blame it on overstimulation.  ;)

(ie a lot of input lately)

[fiftymillimeter]

from a pitchfork interview, talking about the split ep.

"I really like Songs: Ohia. I think Will Oldham had a couple good records, but I'm not really cued into that whole scene. I hate it when people compare me to Will Oldham. I can't stand it. Lots of what he does, I don't feel it's really authentic. I feel like he's trying to do things to make [the songs] feel a certain way. But we're just playing music."

[EC]

That's the one.  Thanks for finding it!!  :)

[fiftymillimeter]

np.

while searching for info about z on vinyl i had read it, then not more than 30 seconds later i saw this post.

[aMillionDreams]

from a pitchfork interview, talking about the split ep.

"I really like Songs: Ohia. I think Will Oldham had a couple good records, but I'm not really cued into that whole scene. I hate it when people compare me to Will Oldham. I can't stand it. Lots of what he does, I don't feel it's really authentic. I feel like he's trying to do things to make [the songs] feel a certain way. But we're just playing music."

Nice. Thanks!  I wonder if they're going to use that quote for the linear notes of that disc?  ;D

[lfish]

This weekend I saw a performance of bonnie prince billy and band (aka mat sweeny).

It was heavenly.  Weird guy (didn't give any attention to the public) but if the music's good, that's all I need.

[Oz]

I'm gonna see the man in Holland and really looking forward to it...

[EC]

Okay.  So is this right?:

Will Oldham is Bonnie Prince Billie
He was also with Jason Molina in Songs:Ohia
And he's in some band called Palace?

Is that all the same guy?  Is Songs:Ohia still together?

[biscuitbobo]

jason molina's not will oldham who's not matt sweeney who's not ned or paul oldham who's not papa m who is Dave Pajo who used to play with will oldham (and Zwan w/ Billy Corgan).......bonnie "prince" billy is will oldham who used to be (or be in) Palace or Palace Brothers or Palace Music..getting the hang of it?  Jason Molina is/was Songs:Ohia and now fronts Magnolia Electric Co. and never will end up being will oldham...at least i don't think so...molecular structure stuff...magnolia elec.co is comprised of people that used to be impossible shapes and/or horns of happiness and others (including mike brenner who used to be Marah)....i hear that the Anomanon, who includes Ned Oldham, has played shows with Brightblack, which includes Paul Oldham (i think?) sometimes and they've never ever played with Billy Bonnie 'cause that's an entirely different stories...excuse grammatical error,etc..

[EC]

Okay.  I think I get it now.  I think.  

Thanks, monsieur.  :)

[thebigbang]

Okay, this thread got me to pondering the ambiguousness that surrounds Will Oldham, his music and his musical identity.  So I scoured the net to try and sort a bit of it out and found this "interview" that I think may explain it well. May explain, because who knows?

From my limited exposure to Oldhams's music in the past, I had agreed with Jim Jame's opinion quoted earlier in this thread.  But maybe he isn't what I had thought.  This is a strange interview and not easy to make sense of it.  I do get the feeling that is exactly what Oldham wants.

I think maybe what I've always liked about MMJ is that they have kept some fun mystery about their music and the band at times (like not showing his face on the Conan show, and the use of stage names), but Oldham's mystery appears to be pretentious.  Guess that is why I buy MMJ music and not Oldham's.

The finest American songwriter of the past decade??? He just may be from Louisville, but I don't think it's Will Oldham.

*******************************************

Still voice, distant life
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,841549,00.html
He's the finest songwriter to come out of America in the past decade. Just ask Johnny Cash. But Will Oldham doesn't play the fame game. He sings under a pseudonym, feels sick at the thought of an interview and dropped three songs from his new album because fans might like them too much. Sean O'Hagan tracks down a wayward genius

Sunday November 17, 2002
The Observer

We are driving through suburban Louisville, Will Oldham and me, past solid wooden houses, their porches overhung with foliage, past darkly lit coffee houses that, in another time, would have been called bohemian, past antique shops and thrift shops and a roadside diner promising Burritos As Big As Your Head. I am accompanying Oldham around his neighbourhood as he does some chores. He is taking a single cowboy boot to the cobbler's to be mended.
Afterwards, he will buy some stamps from the post office next door, pick up his mail from a PO box, and drop off a Japanese art film at the video store across the road. 'I'm kinda busy,' he says, 'so it's best we keep moving while we talk.' We keep moving, all right, but we don't do much talking.

Instead, I tag along with Oldham as he visits his parents' house in a secluded leafy lane. I chat to his dad about the weather - a hurricane has just passed by the edge of Kentucky - while Will burns a CD on the computer.

Then we jump back in Oldham's jeep and drive around the neighbourhood some more, listening to new quiet and intense Will Oldham songs on the stereo. Occasionally, he points out a place of interest. 'The best pastries in Kentucky are right there in the window of that bakery,' he says. Or, 'My high-school sweetheart was the minister's daughter from that church.' All these distractions, I soon realise, are ways to defer the second part of an interview that had been curtailed the previous day when Oldham's discomfort became so palpable that I had called a halt to proceedings. 'This is really unhealthy,' he had told me then. 'Already, I feel a little sick inside about delving into the past and having to go over some of the things we've gone over. It just doesn't help me in any way.' That much was painfully obvious. At one point, when I asked about a breakdown he suffered a few years back, I honestly thought he was going to cry. Or throw up. It was hard to tell which. It was hurting him to have to do this.

Today, then, we are once again driving around in circles, literally and metaphorically. The photographer has just arrived from New York. This seems to have made matters worse. 'I only need 10 minutes,' the photographer says, 'to get a decent portrait.' Oldham looks at him, aghast.

'Ten minutes?' he says. 'Man, that's so wild.' Suddenly I have an idea. Why doesn't he pose for the photograph in disguise? This seems to cheer him up. He knows a good costume shop. We agree to meet the following day. The photographer puts his return flight back several hours. Oldham never shows up. He rings later to say he can't do any more photos. 'Any more?' the photographer says. 'I only have three.' I hang up, having failed to convince our subject to finish the interview or the photo shoot. The photographer and I sit and look at the hotel-room wall for a while. Then he departs for the airport with his three uneasy portraits and some fly-on-the-wall snaps of Oldham in motion - mostly striding away from the camera. 'Remind me again,' he asks as he throws his bag in a cab, 'why are you trying to interview this guy?'

I am trying to interview Will Oldham for several reasons, not least that I consider him to be the finest songwriter to come out of America in the past 10 years. And the most challenging. Plus, in a way, I agree with everything he says about the corrosive and intrusive nature of celebrity. (I just wish he would simply not do interviews, rather than agree to do one, and then sabotage it.)

With Oldham, it seems, all that matters are the songs. Which is why it often seems that he is the only person who is doing something new, something now, with the idea of the song - including sometimes stretching it to breaking point. A Will Oldham song - any Will Oldham song you care to choose - will sound both familiar and utterly alien. It will sound both old and new, fully formed and a little bit broken, complete and somehow unfinished. It will intrigue you and maybe even baffle you and it may well annoy you. The titles alone give some indication of his singular approach. Here is a random selection: 'You Will Miss Me When I Burn', 'Be Still And Know God (And Don't Be Shy)', 'I Tried To Stay Healthy For You', 'Rich Wife Full Of Happiness' and, last but not least, 'You Have Cum On Your Hair (And Your Dick Is Hanging Out)' - which, as the title suggests, is a love song for our times.

Perhaps because of his elusiveness, Oldham has become a cult artist constantly on the cusp of crossover. Next week, without fanfare, he has sold out the Barbican as part of their Further Beyond Nashville festival. Last year, he was acknowledged by the ailing Johnny Cash, who recorded one of Oldham's best and darkest songs, 'I See A Darkness'. Oldham's fans include Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, who has recorded with him, and Harmony Korine, the maverick filmmaker who gave him a cameo in his last film, Julien Donkey-Boy .

For all that, he remains the most mysterious figure in contemporary American music, someone whose increasingly rare interviews often reveal nothing so much as their interrogators' fumbled attempts to get a handle on him. Oldham hates interviews. 'What are they for?' he asks me. 'They have nothing to do with the music. It's usually people asking a bunch of weird questions like, "Why are the songs so slow?" Well, maybe because they are. Because that's how we play them. Because I wrote them at a less rapid pace. It's always why, why why? Why everything? And the answer to "why" is because it just is. Things just are.'

The singer grew so debilitated by a press day to promote his last album, Ease Down The Road, that he ended up talking - or in many cases, not talking - to journalists from his bed. 'I was feverish the whole time. Physically unwell.'

On one level, then, Oldham is the antithesis of the modern celebrity, someone who believes that fame is not even a necessary burden, but a huge, soul-destroying distraction. Someone whose creative modus operandi entails the notion of elusiveness and sabotage in an attempt to bypass the all- pervasive cult of personality that defines contemporary popular culture.

To this end he has, from the start, cloaked himself in personae, releasing his records via a small British independent label, Domino, under a series of tangentially related pseudonyms: Palace, Palace Music, Palace Songs and, latterly, Bonnie Prince Billy - 'It's got the Wild West, the Billy the Kid thing and the Celtic thing.' The albums sometimes feature a snapshot somewhere on the sleeve. Sometimes, Oldham looked like a callow teenager; at others, wild and woolly like a lonesome pilgrim. He was, and remains, hard to place. He wants, he says, people 'to seek out my music. Because that's what I do every day - seek out new stuff. I like it that the audience and I have some common approach to what's going on.'

This, though, is as far as it goes. 'I do not want a personal relationship with my fans,' he says matter-of-factly. 'Or to do anything that encourages them to think they have one with me. They can have a personal relationship with my songs. That's fine, but they don't know me. Likewise the idea that they can get to know me through an interview. That's an absurd notion.'

Like Harmony Korine, whose films sketch out the dead-end lives of trailer-park America, Oldham implicitly knows that our messed-up times need a messed-up art. Sometimes, thus, his words are not for the faint-hearted. ' Give me honky tears,' he howls on 'South Side of the World', a song that manages to sound jaunty and angry, and as close to political as he has yet come.' Give me black blood/ And that of queers/ To mix with my own.' In what he calls his 'most literal song', 'I See A Darkness', he delivers a dark and sombre ode to male friendship in the face of a bleak midwinter of the soul that manages to be both searingly honest and oddly romantic. 'Oh I hope that some day, buddy/ We find peace in our lives/ Together or apart/ Alone or with our wives/ And we can stop our whoring/ And pull the smiles inside/ And light it up forever/And never go to sleep...' Like a lot of great American music, Oldham's manages to sound new while harking back to the country's extraordinary buried tradition of murder ballads, dark spirituals and demonic blues and country songs. When I say this to Oldham, though, he is wary. 'Too much emphasis is put on American roots music when people try and place me. You know, I grew up listening to punk: Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Junior. I'm steeped in a lot of stuff. Led Zeppelin as much as Bukka White. Miles Davis as much as Merle Haggard. It all goes in and some of it stays there, and some of it comes back out. People say, "Oh, it's the South, it's Louisville", but I've not lived here very much in the past 15 years. I'm a nomad. I've lived in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Baltimore. I'm a city kid. I'm not a hick.'

For a long time, though, Will Oldham sounded like a hick. His early albums, Palace Music and There Is No One What Will Take Care Of You, sound like they were made in a shed in the backwoods somewhere way down South. His voice is high and warbly, as fragile-sounding as the often wilfully ramshackle music beneath it. This, it turns out, was down in part to lack of funds. The first album cost $950 to record, the second a mere $350. The third cost $3,000, and that included the cost of a proper producer, Steve Albini. 'That was a whole heap of money, believe me,' remembers Oldham. 'An outrageous amount.' There was also a sense too, though, that Oldham wilfully wanted to sound this way: old and strange and out-of-time.

There is a tradition of artistic, and indeed biographical, reinvention that attends American popular music, and is best illustrated by the middle-class Robert Zimmerman's metamorphosis into the down-at-heel Bob Dylan, who emerged on the New York folk scene like someone blown in from the Dust Bowl.

Oldham's metamorphosis was, if anything, even more unlikely. As a nine-year-old in Louisville, he took drama classes, and as a teenager pursued what he calls 'a fairly rigorous and intensive theatrical training extracurricular to school that ran parallel to having a personal existence'. (His sentences are often constructed like his songs, hanging together in their own singular fashion.)

Later still, he joined the Actors Theatre of Louisville, and drifted through a year at university studying, he says, 'Italian, ornithology and writing.' An actor friend suggested he try his luck in Los Angeles. There, he managed to acquire an agent, and while waiting for work, started writing songs for 'some guys from Louisville who had a studio'. His film career took off when he landed a lead role in John Sayles's powerful 1987 film Matewan, about union struggles in the West Virginia mining communities at the turn of the century. While on location for another film, Thousand Pieces of Gold, in Montana, Oldham had a career crisis. 'I realised I really didn't care about it,' he says, shaking his head. 'It was like, everything I loved about film, and about life, was not there in the acting process, or the auditions. I felt nothing.' He duly fled to New York, wrote some more song lyrics, then wrote to his agent in Hollywood to cancel his contract. 'Music was not really an option at that point,' he says, 'It was like (holds up his fingers) this chord, then that chord... (Long pause that lasts 32 seconds) So I started moving... (Even longer pause that lasts 57 seconds) And I just kept on moving until I came to a halt.'

Oldham finally came to a halt in 'the middle of nowhere' - in the small town of Splitjogradia in Czechoslovakia, to be precise. His restless wandering had led him ever eastwards and was, in retrospect, symptomatic of a deeper crisis that culminated in a breakdown. His recollections of this time are both detailed and hazy. He remembers, for instance, seeing George Bush Sr and Vaclav Havel speaking in Wenceslas Square during the height of the Gulf crisis. He remembers feeling angry and troubled. 'I was basically a useless cellular structure,' he recalls. 'I knew that I couldn't get to where I wanted to be through acting, and that if I kept moving, I might find some kind of answer. It was all internal. I was drifting, but downwards.'

He made it back to Charlottesville, Virginia, where his older brother Paul lived, and began a long recuperation. 'My day was mapped out in books - my morning book, my afternoon book and my evening book. I'd walk to the library every day, read there, then walk four miles through the woods back home, read some more, have a drink with my brother, watch the news, then read some more. That went on for some considerable time.' He began writing songs again, and his brother recorded them on a four-track in the evening.

'I was recuperated after a season,' he says, sounding wavery, 'but I still hadn't got the whole internal-external thing worked out.' Was this when he decided to be a musician instead of an actor? 'No,' he says. 'It's when I decided I wanted to be a pirate.' Are you serious? 'Totally.' Was this because of a book you read? 'Maybe. The thing is, I was trying to follow everything that was going on in my head. That's all I had to hang on to. I didn't really recognise anything I had on the outside. That's really all I can say about that time.'

While people around him saw him improving, Will Oldham was still all at sea inside. He duly enrolled at a sailing school. Did he tell them he wanted to train to be a pirate? 'Yup. But I always said it with a smile on my face.'

While out sailing he had what he calls 'a catatonic episode', and once again his older brother came to the rescue. 'I pretty much figured it was all over,' he says, the words faltering now, and his face clouding over with what can only be described as dread. 'I knew there was something really wrong and that I didn't know how to fix it. My brother came to my folks' house and said, "Why don't you put a band together and play some of those Virginia songs?" Incredible moment, you know? Second time that my older brother saved my life.' (There is a song called 'O Paul' on the 1993 Palace Brothers album There Is No One What Will Take Care Of You.)

Music, too, seems literally to have saved Will Oldham's life. He began writing and recording and playing around Louisville with his brother and some friends. 'At the time,' he says. 'I was thinking, how does a person exist? They exist by pulling everything in, by trying to eat three times a day, by accepting that the physical body is not a separate thing, by accepting that dust gathers in the corners if you don't sweep it out.' This slow epiphany produced a batch of songs written that summer. 'I'd get up at six, work construction all day, come home, take a nap, watch a movie, and write till two or three in the morning. And,' he says, as if it is the most natural thing in the world, 'I'd also masturbate every day... as a discipline.'

So began Oldham's new life as a singer and songwriter. His body of work in the 10 years since is as odd and as wonderful as American music gets, his songs littered with buried clues, stolen lines, odd references to other songs or artists. In 1998, he began releasing records under the pseudonym Bonnie Prince Billy. The two albums that followed, I See A Darkness and Ease Down The Road, are his best, and most consistent, collections - the former dark and wintry; the latter, in contrast, is a veritable paean to the carnal joys of infidelity.

'Billy makes records with real songs on them,' Oldham elaborates. 'I can become him as I step on a stage. He sings the songs, he provides the emotions for them.' Does he write the songs? 'We write them together. Again, part of it is this whole battle between me and what people expect of me. People are looking for fame or a focus, and I can't provide that. I'm not the singer of these songs. I never have been. I make the songs and part of making them is singing them. But what you hear is not me. It's the song. It's through me.' Maybe, I suggest, you should be Bonnie Prince Billy for interviews? 'I've thought about it,' Oldham says. 'But the thing is, he's better than me. And smarter than me. He would never do something like this.'

Bonnie Prince Billy has just recorded a cover of Mariah Carey's 'Can't Take That Away (Mariah's Theme)'. He has also covered an old Scottish folk song, 'Hymn Of The Whale', as well as a fearsome semi-industrial track in the company of the erstwhile drummer from Nine Inch Nails. All of them, oddly enough, sound like Will Oldham songs, which suggests he now has a signature of sorts, though I am sure this notion would not please him. The new Bonnie Prince Billy album, released early next year, is called It's Expected I'm Gone. There are only six songs on it. Originally there were nine. 'I took three off,' he tells me, seriously, 'when everyone I played them to liked them too much.'

The self-sabotage continues apace, then, just as the mythology that now trails America's greatest almost-undiscovered songwriter continues to grow. Will Oldham, it seems, may yet end up as rock's answer to Pynchon or Salinger, famous despite his total antipathy to fame, celebrated in spite of himself.

· Will Oldham is playing at the Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London EC2 (020 7638 8891) on 24 November as part of Further Beyond Nashville. His albums are released by Domino Records in the UK.




Observer Magazine

[EC]

Thank you so much for posting that, bb.

How interesting.